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Detention Around the Globe

News from overseas on the use of immigration detention

We have collected a selection of news stories and opinion editorials about immigration detention and its alternatives in a blog article below. We hope this can be useful in visualising the fight against immigration detention as a global fight and about the challenges detained persons face in countries outside of the UK.

Human Rights Watch finds that 54 unaccompanied children were detained in so-called “protective custody” in police station cells or in immigrant detention centers in December last year. The research finds that these children in detention live in unsanitary conditions, often with unrelated adults, and can be subject to abuse and ill-treatment by police.

Israel has said it will detain and/or deport 38,000 people from Eritrea and Sudan living in Israel to a third country in Africa. Although Prime Minister Netanyahu admits it would not be possible to deport them to their home countries, as it is too dangerous, he denies that they are refugees. If they do not accept 'voluntary return' they will be detained in immigration detention centres.

In the USA, 12 immigrants died in detention in the 2017 fiscal year, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the most since fiscal year 2009. Ten immigration detainees perished in government custody the year before. Nationwide, more than 30,000 people are held at any one time in ICE detention facilities. This is in comparison to the UK where 3,000 people are held in detention centres at any one time, yet still 11 people died in detention in the UK in the last year.

Japan have made plans to limit asylum seekers’ right to work, making changes to its refugee system that are likely to swell the numbers of those in detention centers, prompting concerns from humanitarian groups.

Plans set out in the Canadian National Immigration Detention Framework show intention to remotely monitor migrants via electronic ankle bracelets as an alternative to detaining them. This article criticises the practice saying that it criminalises, stigmatises and alienates migrants from their communities.